Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic generating machine using WordPress.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is post web content consistently to automatically begin bringing web traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will discuss the configuration stage of this process. We will explain why an expertly configured WordPress site is different from a professionally configured one. You will also understand how much work needs to be done to make sure that when all is fully configured, web traffic will automatically start flowing when you post web content to your website.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business becoming increasingly more competitive, it’s worth exploring any advantage that can help you improve your performance and results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage over the competition. An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a significant advantage from the very start.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to describe the difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only are more steps needed to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a little story.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
All was going just fine in the widget plant when things suddenly stopped working.
No one could figure out what has happened and so the manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately went towards the control box. After staring at the board for 2 minutes, the expert then produced a teensy-weensy hammer and made a single tap about three cm from the bottom-left corner of the control unit.
Immediately, the whole workshop lit up and sprang to life again.
The floor manager was overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The manager picked up the phone and rang the expert, demanding to know why they were expected to pay such an exorbitant fee for so little time delivering a minimal amount of work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrived and was placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive visitors to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the plant stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one in the business had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to demand fair compensation for having spent years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to immediately avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your website or blog set up so all you had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
While the solution to many challenges often seems quite simple once it’s been implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few settings. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up and activate to achieve desired results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured to ensure that processes will work as envisioned, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing and configuring one or two plugins, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of various different components such as your web server, your website, and various external sites and/or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram of the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your hosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings in your web hosting account that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your hosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic your business can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and services.
External Sites
The idea behind adding external sites is that all of your content will get posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it will get automatically distributed to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external services have been added to your configuration, content linking back to your website will get automatically added to search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and business will benefit from added exposure online, helping you tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the external sites and solutions will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress site to help save time and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmasters)
Google Search Console lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of essential information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site data, your account information can be used to automate web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account, account code can be added to all of your pages in WordPress using plugins used with other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your account and site details with Bing Webmaster Tools have been set up, you can use the information to automate web traffic settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers both the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your automated web traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your social accounts in order to configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
Once you have set up and configured everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site.
You should have pages set up with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can You can post your content to loads of social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose those that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(There are loads of social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different users.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your social feed.
There are many different sites and platforms you can incorporate into your own web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website Or Blog For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains an important and often overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Section)
As described in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely configured your settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the list of services entered into the Update Services section
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is available …
(Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post to this section and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading Settings
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to get the rest of the content from a partial feed, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to instantly ping various update services whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion Settings
Although this section is mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs linked to from your articles, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the ways your post permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring permalinks)
If you need help setting up WordPress permalinks, see this step-by-step tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
WordPress – Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality to your site, including traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help drive more traffic
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No website or blog is guaranteed immunity from being attacked by hackers.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to botnets and hackers.
Go here for more information:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web pages easier for search engines to index …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugins For SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to find, classify and index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using WordPress plugins.
Many social share plugins let you choose which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, many themes also provide built-in options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) allow you to configure options and settings for improved traffic results)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your pages is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to configure your options and enable the function …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure For Improved Traffic
Last (but by no means least) in the WordPress traffic system configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with good and unwanted traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you are making money online, you need to make sure that your website stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Compliant?)
To learn more about how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website, go here:
Tags And Categories
Post categories & tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your pages.
(Categories help search engines better organize and index your website, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s post tags and post categories should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
When looking at ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and post categories that have been set up.
Add A Site Map
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications find your website content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Although Google will index your site just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – Don’t Lose Traffic!
When visitors searching online for your website enter the wrong URL into their browser or click on a hyperlink pointing to a destination on your site that no longer exists, they will typically be greeted with a 404 Not Found page …
(A 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your web server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to automatically bring more traffic is publish fresh content on a regular basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of various components and web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise required to perform this stage of the traffic automation process typically takes many web professionals months to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive tutorial series aimed at helping website owners learn how to grow their business online using a WordPress-driven website and proven web marketing strategies.
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